Serious vulnerability in phpMyAdmin discovered

All versions of phpMyAdmin, the popular MySQL administration tool, up to and including version 2.11.9.0 and the 3.0.0 release candidate 1, suffer from a code execution vulnerability. Versions 2.11.9.1 and 3.0.0-rc2 have been released with the vulnerability fixed. The phpMyAdmin developers describe the flaw as serious and recommend upgrading to the appropriate new version.

The advisory released by the phpMyAdmin developers stated the problem was that parameters of sort_by were not escaped and an attacker, if they were already logged in, could manipulate this to call the PHP exec function and run arbitrary code. The vulnerability was discovered by Norman Hippert in 3.0.0 RC1 initially, and checking showed that previous versions were also affected.